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Art and the MUSINGS of an Artist

Friday’s Famous Artist is …. Jackson Pollock

Imagine if you will a world filled with post renaissance work, Madonna and child, an eloquent Victorian lady in a scene perhaps the illuminating painting of Monet or Van Gogh to seize upon.

Fresh out of the war and into a new idea of American Importance comes Jackson Pollack, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko and Robert Motherwell to name a few. Flash forward here we are in American in the 1940’s fresh out of the depression to end all depressions and World War 2. Enter Peggy Guggenheim.

This is New York in 1942 where Peggy Guggenheim established the Museum of Modern Art named after her Uncle. With a thrill for the unusual and a absolute passion for abstract art,New York became the entreated hub for theNew form of work called Abstract Impressionism.

“They worked large and they worked messily, recklessly. Pollock “broke the ice,” de Kooning would say.”

In fact Pollack was given supreme prestige for his work, a position garnered without the intense presence or nod from “the old school.” America/Pollack, were creating their own identity and staking a claim on art that no other place in the world could. For This Pollock earned a supreme and undeniable place in history.

The great mystery of unlocking a door no person had ever unlocked in the art world … that honor went not only to his friends but also to Pollack who seized the essence of this unique form of expression and laid it down on the canvas. In this process his friends and colleagues also imparted their own vision in the wake of knowledge unknown to artists before.

Notorious for his drinking problem and his struggle with alcoholism, Pollock crashed his car August 11, 1956 and died near his New York home.

“Abstract painting is abstract. It confronts you. There was a reviewer a while back who wrote that my pictures didn’t have any beginning or any end. He didn’t mean it as a compliment, but it was.” Jackson Pollock